Biography
Diamond was born in Boston to a physician father and a teacher/musician/linguist mother. After attending The Roxbury Latin School, he earned a BA degree from Harvard in 1958 and his PhD in physiology and membrane biophysics from Cambridge University in 1961. During 1962-1966, he returned to Harvard as a junior Fellow. He became professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School in 1966. While in his twenties, he also developed a second parallel career in the ecology and evolution of New Guinea birds, and he has led numerous trips to explore New Guinea and nearby islands. In his fifties, Diamond gradually developed a third career in environmental history, becoming professor of geography and of environmental health sciences at UCLA, his current position.
Works
Diamond is renowned as the author of a number of popular science works that combine anthropology, biology, linguistics, genetics, and history. While Diamond became a staunch opponent of the use of genetic and racial arguments to account for the differences in technological sophistication, in 1986 he wrote a commentary entitled "Ethnic differences: Variation in human testis size," in which he commented on possible relations between testis size, hormone levels, and rates of dizygotic twinning in various ethnic groups.His best-known work is the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), which asserts that the main international issues of our time are legacies of processes that began during the early-modern period, in which civilizations that had experienced an extensive amount of "human development" began to intrude upon simpler civilizations around the world. Diamond's quest is to explain why such advanced civilizations developed only in Eurasia, and to do so in ways that do not appeal to ethnocentric myths, but do away with them. Although it identifies the main processes and factors of civilizational development that were present in Eurasia, but not elsewhere, it does so by tracing commonalities between Eurasian civilizations, leaving the question open of why Europe came to supersede other Eurasian civilizations after 1800.In his most recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2004), Diamond examines what caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin and considers what contemporary society can learn from their fates.
